~Written for the QLFC, Season 5, Round 3~

Team: Wigtown Wanderers

Position: Seeker

Position Prompt: Write about a buried Truth being unearthed after decades and its consequences OR write about a Dare that is unearthed and carried out after decades, and its consequences.

Word Count: x

Betas: CUtopia, VanillaAshes

A Harsh Reality

Grimmauld Place had never been a welcoming abode. From the darkness of the narrow doorway to the gloomy, equally narrow windows forever smothered in closed drapes, every inch of its exterior breathed of deterrence. And that was to those who could see it.

Grimmauld Place hadn't been seen in years. Not even by the Wizarding world.

Lily took a deep breath as she stood before the doorway. The towering house, squeezed between numbers ten and fourteen, had been vanished for years. Decades, even, and no one had cared. Or, more likely, no one had noticed. Few enough people had known of Grimmauld Place anyway. To say it was a secret, a hidden truth…

It wouldn't be incorrect, exactly, but neither was it entirely accurate.

Lily didn't knock upon the door. She didn't ring the antique doorbell, nor raised her voice to request entrance. Something of the building, of Grimmauld Place itself, forbade such a violation. It forbade entrance, even, but Lily -

She had a purpose. For a house that hadn't existed, had hidden, to suddenly appear when she most needed it? Memories of school days long gone, of her youth and crossing before the empty wall of the seventh floor corridor in wait for the Room of Requirement rose to mind.

Lily opened the door. The creak was ominous, a sharp contrast to the idling putter of cars on the footpath behind her, the distant chatter of pedestrians and the tooting of even more distant horns in the further distance. The moment Lily stepped inside, it was as though a blanket had fallen over her ears, muffling, as thick as the dust that immediately flooded her nostrils. The door closed with an equally creaking swing behind her and the sounds disappeared entirely.

It was dark in that hallway. That narrow, gloomy hallway, without even a candle of overhead light for illumination. Breathing deeply – and nearly coughing for the inhalation of yet more dust – she crossed the threshold. Her feet, steps that she only realised were tiptoeing when she glanced towards them, were soundless upon the thick rug. Dust and more dust. The rug itself was grey, a mask of the indiscernible colour it had once been.

Blank walls, the slight discolouration of where had once sat portraits the only decor. Empty air but for the motes that drifted in lazy twirls, not quite visible but felt. And silent. So silent it was almost eerie. Lily swallowed, stepped - tiptoed - further inside. Silent but for a distant groan that was felt rather than heard. The house itself seemed to sigh beneath the weight of its emptiness and loneliness.

Lily passed down the hallway. She paused at a door, peered into a room, but… empty. Utterly empty, with not a shroud of sheet over furniture. Empty but for the dust. Another step, another glimpse into a room, and more emptiness presented itself. How lonely. How unutterably lonely.

The hallway was bare, steps grey from dust or age or both or neither, but slightly illuminated. Lily didn't know by what, could only hazard a guess that the faint illumination hearkened from upper floors that emitted an ambient light. She glanced upwards, up the stairwell and towards balustrades that skirted the platforms of upper floors.

Empty. Always empty.

"Hello?"

The emptiness ate her words. They didn't echo, smothered by the dust, and Lily bit back another cough. Only for a moment, however, before she gave into the urge and stuttered in splutters that sounded deafeningly loud to her ears. Then she tried again. "Hello? Is anyone here?"

No answer. Lily hadn't really been expecting any, even if the sudden appearance of Grimmauld Place was an invitation of sorts. Dropping a hand onto the balustrade, skin sliding slightly on the thin film of dust that darkened the polished wood, she turned to the stairs. And she climbed; in tiptoes, because regardless of what sense told her, she couldn't quite help herself. The house just seemed… old. Ancient, and empty, and stubbornly clinging to that emptiness.

Three stories she climbed. Three stories and past multiple floors and hallways and rooms. All empty, all laden in dust and all swallowing her words as she called into the persisting emptiness. Lily pressed her lips together. She wouldn't think her entrance had been in vain. She wouldn't think that Grimmauld Place presenting itself to her after years of absence was for no reason. And so she climbed.

"Hello?" she called, pausing on the third-floor landing to the barest of creaks on thin floorboard covering. There was no reply, still no reply, and Lily thinned her lips further. "You're here, aren't you? I know you are."

No reply, but the house sighed as though in resignation. Lily stepped down the hallway. Her feet scuffed on the runner of carpet, just as it had on the floors below. She blinked into the gloom of the empty rooms in just the same way as she had. Eyes grazed over empty walls, across empty floors, towards closed windows and loneliness. Until…

There was one door. One single door, and the furthest from the entrance to the lonely house. When Lily considered, she thought she might have suspected it to be The Room. The one room, where she would find him. Where she expected to find him. Where few enough people in the world expected to find him, as nobody even believed he existed after his disappearance, but for her family.

She didn't knock. She didn't raise her voice to announce herself. Lily pushed the door open with fingers that were only a little tentative but not hesitant in the slightest.

And there he was.

The room wasn't quite empty, but it was nearly so. There was a chair, which he was sat in. There was a desk, and he sat behind it, elbow propped atop. The window right by his side wasn't wholly covered by curtains, and his gaze was turned through the fogged glass, peering at nothing and everything. At the world that didn't know he existed. Not anymore.

Were Lily to have seen him for the first time, she would think the young man barely twenty, and perhaps not even that. Short, thin, with a mop of tousled hair just a little overlong and round, outdated spectacles upon his nose. A wizard in modern society wouldn't be wearing those; Optico-Medimancy had improved in leaps and bounds in the past decades. They as much as the worn jeans just visible beneath the desk, the lumpy sweater faded from its vivid green colour – all of it spoke of times gone by. Of a time that only he still existed in.

Time had been kind to Harry Potter. Too kind, even. So kind it was almost cruel.

Lily couldn't quite step into the room. Her hand squeezed the doorknob and she swallowed thickly. Years, it had been. Too many years since she'd seen him, and he hadn't aged a day. He never would, either, or so she suspected. She and her brothers and her mother, her entire family. They and they alone, because for all intents and purposes, Harry Potter, the once Saviour of the Wizarding World, had vanished.

The truth was far harsher. A cruel twist of fate, even, that he should be so afflicted with the curse that his nemesis Voldemort had sought to obtain at all costs.

The doorknob bit into Lily's palm, but she hardly felt it. It was suddenly a struggle to speak. A struggle to breathe, even; perhaps all that dust had clogged in her throat? But she swallowed again, and eventually, she spoke.

"Hi, Dad."

Harry Potter could have been a statue. Until that moment, at least, he could have been carved from stone. When Lily spoke, however, he blinked as he seemed to have refrained from doing and twitched. He drew a breath that shifted his shoulders and slowly, so slowly, as slowly as the lonely house was old and dusty, he turned towards her. Even across the distance between them, Lily could see his eyes. They were the same as her brother's, though Albus had never looked so world-weary. Never so… exhausted.

"I need you to come with me."

Harry blinked again. He stared, and the impression was eerie. For more than that he was her father who looked young enough to be her son, Lily felt uneasy. It had just been so long.

"Mum needs you. It's… it's getting close, Dad. I don't think she'll last much longer and she said… she asked for…"

Lily trailed off. She couldn't quite finish her words, couldn't utter the reality of the situation that was the gradual decline of Ginny Weasley. But for all of his silence and slowness, all of his detachedness, Harry appeared to have heard her.

He straightened slightly. Slowly, almost like the old man that he was yet didn't appear, he straightened. He still met Lily's eyes, and within them a haunted light grew. "Is the world ready for that?"

Lily's grasp on the doorknob was painful, but she didn't care. If anything, she appreciated it. It was grounding. "I don't really care. Not anymore. Mum needs you, Dad."

Harry stared for a long moment. Everything seemed to be long, to take a long time. It was almost aggravating - or would have been, if Lily didn't feel it entirely in-keeping with the house itself. Then Harry nodded sagely. "Then so be it. And the world will know."

Then Harry Potter, the Boy Who Had Lived Twice and continued to live unerringly, rose to his feet to reveal the truth to the world.